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How I write code using Cursor

arguingwithalgorithms.com

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Re: How I write code using Cursor

#301

Post by lomase »

whatever1 wrote: post #276
frde_me wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be honest, I've never had the command line tool to setup a React / NextJS / Solid / Astro / Svelt / any framework app fail to make something that runs, ever

What exactly magic command line tool are you referring to? What cmd tool configures the frontend framework to use a particular css framework, webpack to work with your backend endpoints properly, setups cors and authentication with the backend for development, configures the backend to point to and serve the spa?

dotnet new

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#302

Post by cynicalpeace »

dvsfish wrote: post #270
stocknoob wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The naysayers used to bother me, but then I realized it’s no skin off my back if they don’t want to become familiar with a transformative technology. Stay with the old tools, people are getting excited for no reason at all, everyone is just pretending to be more productive! It reminds me of how blackberry users insisted physical keyboards were necessary and smartphone touchscreen users were deluded.

I think most naysayers are threatened by the inevitable decimation of our value. Supply and demand laws are going to annihilate this profession

This is the fundamental question most of us seem to have.

On the one hand, logic does seem to dictate supply/demand of the profession will lower salaries. Also no one really cares how code was written or if it's pretty.

On the other hand, these tools have only seemed to increase our value so far. Someone who knows how to code with AI is now 1000x more valuable than someone who doesn't know how to code.

You still need to know how to code to be able to contribute. How long that remains the case is the question. You could be right

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#303

Post by kccqzy »

lgas wrote: post #283
kccqzy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you trust that it didn't just alter or omit some sentences from your blog post? I just use Pandoc for that purpose and it takes 30 seconds, including the time to install pandoc. For code generation where you'll review everything, AI makes sense; but for such conversion tasks, it doesn't because you won't review the generated HTML.

> And how do you trust that it didn't just alter or omit some sentences from your blog post? How do you trust a human in the same situation? You don't, you verify.

What? Is this a joke? Have you actually worked with human office assistants? The whole point of human assistants is that you don't need to verify their work. You hire them with a good wage and you trust that they are working in good faith.

It's disorienting for me to hear that some people are so blinded by AI assistants that they no longer know how human assistants behave.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#304

Post by ativzzz »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #284
fassssst wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it’s like riding an e-bike. More fun because I can go faster and see and do more.

This is actually a great analogy. You get to accomplish a lot more, much faster, but you lose much of the benefit to your fitness.

> you lose much of the benefit to your fitness

If you're biking for the purpose of fitness then this is a downside, but if your goal is to see more and go further, then it's an acceptable tradeoff.

Similar to coding. If you're writing code because you enjoy writing code, it's less fun. If you're writing code to build stuff, AI will help you build faster

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#305

Post by alonsonic »

vishal-padia wrote: post #2

In the article, you mentioned that you've been writing code for 36 years, so don't you feel IDEs like cursor make you feel less competent? Meaning I loved the process of scratching my head over a problem and then coming to a solution but now we have AI Agents solving the problems and optimizing code which takes the fun out of it.

For a lot of people the fun and rewarding part is actually building and shipping something useful to users. Not solving complex puzzles / algoritic challenges. If AI gets me in front of users faster then I'm a happier builder.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#306

Post by extr »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #82
extr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the SOTA LLM solutions like this have nearly the same problem. Sure the context window is huge, but there is no guarantee the model understands what 100K tokens of code is trying to accomplish within the context of the full codebase, or even into the real world, within the context of the business. They are just not good enough yet to use in real projects. Try it, start a greenfield project with "just cursor" like…

Cursor has a built in embeddings/RAG solutions to mitigate this problem.

Embeddings/RAG don't address the problem I'm talking about. The issue is that you can stuff the entire context window full of code and the models will superficially leverage it, but will still violate existing conventions, inappropriately bring in dependencies, duplicate functionality, etc. They don't "grok" the context at the correct level.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#307

Post by barbazoo »

supaflybanzai wrote: post #58
dartos wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs seem like magic unless you remember when search worked. Yikes. I didn’t even think about this, but it’s true. I’m looking for the kinds of answers that Google used to surface from stack overflow

Kagi… Fully switched over more than a year ago and never looked back.

Kagi with the "Programming" lense turned on

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#308

Post by tsarchitect »

zkry wrote: post #198
cynicalpeace wrote: post #175

It's amazing how little of my colleagues don't use Cursor simply because they haven't taken the 10 minutes to set it up. It's amazing how many naysayers there are about Cursor. There are many here and they obviously don't use Cursor. I know this because they point out pitfalls that Cursor barely runs into, and their criticism is not about Cursor, but about AI code in general. Some examples: "I tried to create a TODO…

I've noticed that tools like Cursor doesn't really seem to make difference in the end. The good software developers are still the good software developers, regardless of editors. I don't think you should be upset or worried that people aren't adopting these tools as you think they should. If the tool really lives up to its hype then the non-adopters will fall behind and, for example, be forced to switch to Cursive. T…

To be proven wrong would be that Cursor is used by all devs or that IDEs adopt AI into their workflow?

Like OP using cursor has been a huge productivity boost. I maintain a few postgres databases, I work as a fullstack developer, and manage kubernetes configs. When using cursor to write sql tables or queries it adopts my way of writing sql. It analyzed (context) my database folder and when I ask it to create a query, a function, a table, the output is in my style. This blew me away when I first started with cursor.

Onto react/nextjs projects. In the same fashion, I have my way of writing components, fetching data, and now writing RSA. Cursor analyzed my src folder, and when asked to create components from scratch the output was again similar to my style. I use raw CSS and class names, what was an obstacle of naming has become trivial with Cursor ("add an appropriate class to this component with this styling"). Again, it analyzed all my CSS files and spits out css/classes in my writing/formatting style. And working on large projects it is easy to forget the many many components, packages, etc. that integrated/have been written already. Again, cursor comes out on top.

Am I good developer or a bad developer? Don't know. Don't care. I'm cranking out features faster than I have ever done in my decades of development. As has been said before, as a software engineer you spend more time reading code than writing. Same applies to genAI. It turns out that I can ask cursor to analyze packages, spit out code, yaml configuration, sql, and it gets me 80% done with writing from scratch. Heck, if I need types to get full client/server type completion experience, it does that too! I have removed many dependencies (tailwind, tRPC, react query, prisma, to name a few) because cursor has helped me overcome obstacles that these tool assisted in (and I still have typescript code hints in all my function calls!).

All in all, cursor has made a huge difference for me. When colleagues ask me to help them optimize sql, I ask cursor to help out. When colleagues ask to write generic types for their components, I ask cursor to help out. Whether cursor or some other tool, integrating AI with the IDE has been a boom for me.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#309

Post by nuancebydefault »

kccqzy wrote: post #303
lgas wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And how do you trust that it didn't just alter or omit some sentences from your blog post? How do you trust a human in the same situation? You don't, you verify.

What? Is this a joke? Have you actually worked with human office assistants? The whole point of human assistants is that you don't need to verify their work. You hire them with a good wage and you trust that they are working in good faith. It's disorienting for me to hear that some people are so blinded by AI assistants that they no longer know how human assistants behave.

It appears op has a different experience. Each human assistant is different.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#310

Post by handzhiev »

cynicalpeace wrote: post #175

It's amazing how little of my colleagues don't use Cursor simply because they haven't taken the 10 minutes to set it up. It's amazing how many naysayers there are about Cursor. There are many here and they obviously don't use Cursor. I know this because they point out pitfalls that Cursor barely runs into, and their criticism is not about Cursor, but about AI code in general. Some examples: "I tried to create a TODO…

I also find it fascinating how in almost every LLM-related discussion there are people always writing arguments to prove that LLMs do not work.

OK, I understand. Maybe they can't get much use of them and that's fine. But why they always insist that the tools don't work for everyone is something I can't make any sense of.

I stopped arguing online about this though. If they don't want to use LLMs that's fine too. Others (we) are taking their business.

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